Tropophilia

Here is my third — and probably final — installment in the series of posts I’ve been writing about my transition to West Coast life.  Retroactive thanks for allowing me to hijack this space to map out my thoughts on this huge life overhaul.  I hope you’ve found the posts entertaining, and possibly useful in your own life changes.  Please bear with me as I seek to rediscover my niche on Tropophilia in light of my new job!

I’ve been in California for almost two weeks now, and think I’ll have trouble ever letting myself leave.  The weather here has been nothing short of spectacular.  I’m not sure I’ve seen a cloud since I’ve been here.  The mornings and evenings are much cooler than I expected, but the lack of humidity is a blessing that I cannot fully express.  The people here are very nice, too.  It’s not the sugary Southern brand of nice — it’s a very transparent, laid-back kindness and empathy.  But sometimes I miss the sugary Southern brand.

Today, though, I want to talk about the place where I’ve been spending most of my time: Google.  I wish I could tell you everything.  Unfortunately, though, there are things I just am not allowed to share.  :-(  So forgive me in advance if I skip around some things or sound really vague.

Google is definitely the fun house that the media portrays it to be.  There is a stocked mini kitchen about 30 feet from my desk.  We have a ping pong table, pool table, massage chair, and massage room in our building.  There’s a room where you can pick up whatever kind of computer hardware you need — all new in original packaging so you get the pleasure of unboxing :) — just by swiping your badge.  There are departmental and company-wide happy hours and off-sites.  One of Google’s eighteen cafés is also in our building, serving hot and fresh breakfasts, lunches, and dinners — all for free.  And that’s just our building.  In other buildings (short rides away on one of the scores of community bikes) there are nap pods, gyms, ball pits, slides, and other as-yet undiscovered shenanigans.

We. are. spoiled.  But believe it or not, people do work here, and they work really hard.

So, how to describe my job?  Well, it is a lot bigger than I expected, but that’s actually a great thing.  To put it simply, my job is to assist the Product Counsel team manage the legal side of developing, approving, launching, and monitoring new and existing Google products.  Each of the lawyers has a portfolio of products that they “own.”  Products are developed by teams, and so the lawyers are like mini General Counsels for different product teams.  I do have some day-to-day (well… more like week-to-week) recurring duties, but a lot of my time is spent with special or long-term, ongoing projects.  I still don’t fully have my head wrapped around my job, but I am (oddly) already feeling very comfortable.  I haven’t felt overwhelmed yet, though I’m sure it will come.  My strategy has been this: take one e-mail at a time, never be afraid to ask questions, and breathe.

Continue reading ‘Journeys With Jrod — Part III: Googlin’’

Welcome to a series of posts that I’m going to name after my old personal blog: Journeys with Jrod.  My goal here is to chronicle my thoughts and actions as I pack up my life in one city and move it to another.  Who knows what will happen, but I’m hoping that it will serve as a sort of personal frame tale within the larger study of change that is Tropophilia.  On a slightly more selfish note, it will also give me a way to work out my own thoughts and feelings about leaving my friends and familiar surroundings for a new, unfamiliar setting. I look forward to reading your feedback and advice in the comments.

How It Happened

It began with nothing.

Doing nothing, that is.  Due to circumstances beyond my and, to a slightly lesser degree, beyond my employer’s control, I had no work to do.  A good third, at the least, of my time was being “billed to the firm”, as we say — in other words, being wasted.  Of course, I’m no enemy of free time.  The first few days of idleness were devoted to writing long-overdue responses to e-mails I had received, catching up on blog and news items, and spending some fun hours on YouTube and MiniClip.

Yet, as this blog’s existence proves, I’m not very good with extended periods of unproductivity.  Taylor and I created Tropophilia to fend off the atrophy of our creative and other mental powers that were trained and honed at Davidson.  I felt the same pangs sometimes during my year in France.  The feeling of being really challenged just wasn’t there.  And so it was that I began thinking about trying to find a new job.

I had applied to Google last year before graduation, for a position as a Trademark Assistant I believe.  I’d been a fan of Google for years as my interests in technology had developed, and knew that I wanted to head to law school down the road, so this seemed like it would be the perfect marriage of those interests.  They didn’t have a space for me, though, so my sights refocused on moving to Washington, D.C. and seeking paralegal positions from the abundance of firms headquartered there.

Now it was a different story, though.  I had a year of paralegal experience under my belt.  I had informed myself on legal issues in the technology industry through lots of reading and, a little later, writing.  And, unlike in those months preceding graduation when I was well in the grips of academic intellectual stimulation, I now had something that lacked in my first application: a very real, very intense hunger to have a job that would make a difference, that would teach me new and interesting things, that would challenge me.

Continue reading ‘Journeys With Jrod — Part I: The Decision’